Let’s start here, with an opinion piece by former Tennessee governors Bill Haslem (R) and Phil Bredesen (D)
We’re a Democrat and a Republican. Here’s how both parties can start on gun reform – together.
We’re two former Tennessee governors, we both served eight years, one of us is a Democrat, the other a Republican. We have different views on various issues, and we’re friends (snip)
We’ve both come to deeply respect the wisdom and common sense that Senator Baker embodied. One thing he often told people was that whenever you have two sides that are hopelessly divided, the trick is to find something, even a little thing, that you can agree on, and then build from there.
We could start with “red flag” laws — a way to identify people with potentially dangerous mental health issues and a legal process to remove their access to firearms. That might have been effective in the shooting we just had; the shooter was under treatment for mental health issues and yet still obtained and possessed multiple guns.
Another small step might be making gun owners take more legal responsibility for securing their weapons. Anyone, conservative or liberal, who believes in the value of personal responsibility should be able to agree that it is irresponsible to possess a dangerous weapon and not reasonably secure it from misuse by others.
Here’s are the problems: Democrats want red flag laws to be super intrusive and used to deny people their gun rights for the most minor of things. They want to heavily penalize people if their guns are stolen and not completely secured (and aren’t particularly concerned with the thieves). Even penalize if it’s not secured to the point where it makes a firearm worthless for protection. Oh, and what the Democrats really want is mass bans. They would take those “small steps” agreements and blow by them. Here’s the editorial board of the Sharon, Pa The Herald
EDITORIAL: Semiautomatic rifles belong in a special category
….
“Any rifle, whether it’s a hunting rifle or a military-style rifle, ups the anxiety, ups the danger because of its penetrative capability,” said Jewell. “A rifle bullet travels further, faster and harder than a handgun round.”
Jewell declined to differentiate semiautomatics from other types of rifles — including single-shot, bolt action, lever action and pump action.
But there is an important difference.
Other types of rifles available to the general public, a qualifier that excludes fully automatic weapons, requires shooters to take some sort of action after firing before they can shoot again. Whether that’s reloading in the case of a single-shot weapon or pulling back a bolt or lever or pump, there is a delay between shooting one round and the next.
With a semiautomatic rifle, the shooter fires a round with each trigger pull. No additional steps required.
If semiautomatic rifles compel multiple police officers to stand down rather than engage a single shooter armed with one, then we have to conclude that they are too dangerous for the general public to own and use.
We don’t allow for private ownership of bazookas, machine guns or flamethrowers. Semiautomatic firearms belong in the same category. It’s time to reinstate the ban that existed in this country from 1994 to 2004, when Congress allowed it to expire.
They are not differentiating between the scary looking “assault rifles” and other semi-auto rifles. They want them all banned. They flip here and there and mention AR-15s, but, they really do want a blanket ban. And more
Semiautomatic rifles wouldn’t disappear instantly if they became illegal. But owners who comply with a law would surrender theirs.
The rest would be swept up, by ones and twos and threes, and their owners punished with federal prison sentences. With no new ones entering the market, they would eventually become rare, then non-existent.
That’s right, it would be illegal to own any, no grandfathering, which is a Constitutional violation. The “let’s work together” Republicans just do not get it. Even though Democrats tell them explicitly.
Read: Surprise: Gun Grabbers Call For Banning All Semi-Automatic Rifles »